Creating Cooperation: How States Develop Human Capital in Europe(Cornell Studies in Political Economy)

In Creating Cooperation, Pepper D. Culpepper explains the successes and failures of human capital reforms adopted by the French and German governments in the 1990s. Employers and employees both stand to gain from corporate investment in worker skills, but uncertainty and mutual distrust among companies doom many policy initiatives to failure. Higher skills benefit society as a whole, so national governments want to foster them. However, business firms often will not invest in training that makes their workers more attractive to other employers, even though they would prefer having better-skilled workers.Culpepper sees in European training programs a challenge typical of contemporary problems of public policy: success increasingly depends on the ability of governments to convince private actors to cooperate with each other. In the United States as in Europe, he argues, policy-makers can achieve this goal only by incorporating the insights of private information into public policy. Culpepper demonstrates that the lessons of decentralized cooperation extend to industrial and environmental policies. In the final chapter, he examines regional innovation programs in the United Kingdom and the clean-up of the Chesapeake Bay in the United States-a domestic problem that required the coordination of disparate agencies and stakeholders.

About the Author :
Pepper D. Culpepper is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is coeditor of The German Skills Machine: Sustaining Comparative Advantage in a Global Economy.

Review :
"David Soskice and Peter Hall's agenda-setting edited volume Varieties of Capitalism appeared in 2001, and much of the work that appeared as chapters there is now beginning to appear as the first books of assistant professors. Pepper Culpepper's superb, theoretically literate, and empirically well researched comparative monograph is one of these...Culpepper is a deeply learned and widely read scholar, very aware of the steps he is taking and, as a result, constantly stopping to address potential alternative explanations and challenges to his research design, empirical argument, and theoretical line of thought. I highly recommend Creating Cooperation to anyone interested in the problem of cooperation in general, rational choice versus constructivism in political economy, and the specific politics of human capital creation in contemporary Europe. This is a fascinating and bold book on many levels."-Perspectives on Politics (2004), No. 2 "This book deepens our understanding of how to foster what might be deemed 'positive' cooperation in public policy reform. This is a book that will appeal to those interested in the study of human capital policies in Europe and intrigued about the sources of social cooperation. It is a detailed, well-researched analysis that successfully illustrates why, as problems of decentralized cooperation arise across the industrialized world, we need to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the conditions that foster successful cooperative public policy."-Paul Riseborough, EU Policy Network, The Journal of European Affairs 2:1, February 2004 "This intelligent, lucid, and subtle book leads the way to an understanding of the dynamics, as well as the comparative statistics, of contrasting types of capitalism. By comparing regions within and between Germany and France, Culpepper probes beyond national variables to explore the conditions of cooperation among employers. The result is a book that is both theoretically innovative and empirically rich."-Gary Marks, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill "This is an important, illuminating book. By carefully studying strategies to create human capital in the form of training skilled workers, Pepper CD. ulpepper explores comparative capitalism and public policy in ways that extend theoretical debates about rationality, norms, strategic interaction, social capital, cooperation, and the relationship between the state and civil society. While the cases are drawn from France and Germany, the material is relevant to politics in all countries, large and small, in all regions of the world. Creating Cooperation is excellent for teaching."-Peter A. Gourevitch, Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego "Creating Cooperation is an excellent book about the politics of policy-making in the advanced industrial states. Pepper Culpepper's argument and his approach make an important contribution to political economy literature."-Richard Locke, Massachusetts Institute of Technology "Serious and believable analyses of what it takes for a government to create an effective training regime are rare. Creating Cooperation meets and exceeds these goals. Pepper Culpepper does a superb job of explaining why some regions are able to establish workable public/private training initiatives while others fail. His framework is sophisticated and his research is meticulous."-Paul Osterman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School and Department of Urban Studies and Planning